Graffiti CMS

For several weeks now, I've been working with a new tool from the folks at Telligent (they wrote Community Server, the software that runs blogs.msdn.com) called Graffiti CMS. The CMS in this case stands for "content made simple" and Graffiti, in my experience, really delivers on this idea.

Graffiti sits somewhere in between a blog engine and a content management system. Adding content is as simple as posting to a blog (and you can even use tools like Windows Live Writer to publish content to Graffiti), but you can also easily customize your site by changing themes (or creating your own), adding links, or if you really want to go wild, by creating widgets and/or plug-ins.

Graffiti has a free express edition available that supports a single site and up to three content contributor accounts. I'm now running a handful of sites on Graffiti (full disclosure...Telligent provided me with a server license for Graffiti for personal use), including my local church softball team site, for which I created a Theme (called, appropriately enough, Softball) and a plug-in that renders a Virtual Earth map based on a Windows Live Maps collection. Both the theme and the plug-in are now available on the Graffiti Marketplace from within your Graffiti control panel, so if you're using Graffiti try them out and let me know what you think.

You can see them in action in the screenshot to the left.

Another cool plug-in you might want to take a look at is the Graffiti UserGroups plug-in/theme combo from Alexander Groß. I downloaded and played with it a bit and it's pretty cool. The only downside I see is that by default it requires the use of their custom theme, which prevents me from using it. It should be possible, however, to modify another theme to display the information, so I might end up using this.

What's cool about Graffiti is that it's very quick and simple to set up, and doesn't require any special knowledge to get started with. And as a .NET developer, the fact that widgets and plug-ins are easy to write by simply extending some of Graffiti's built-in classes is a big bonus.

I've also written a widget for my colleague Brian Hitney's Worldmaps service. The widget takes a WorldMaps user ID and displays a thumbnail map of the hits for that account in the sidebar (if you don't provide a user ID, it will display a map of all hits for all WorldMaps accounts). You can choose between a 200 pixel or 160 pixel wide thumbnail, and can optionally have the map expand on mouseover to show a more detailed version of the map, all without knowing a lick of javascript. The WorldMaps widget is not available on the Graffiti marketplace, so if you'd like to try that one, just drop me a line, and I'll be happy to send it to you.